These Santas and Jesuses Wouldn't Make It On Fox News

December 12, 2013

Fox News' Megyn Kelly, usually one of the saner voices on the network, responded on her show Wednesday night to a Slate piece questioning why Santa Claus had to be a white man. “And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly said on the broadcast.

And with that, America had yet another astonishingly stupid culture war battle on its hands: Yes, we were debating the ethnic background of a fictional character.

Kelly quickly added to the hoopla by announcing that "Jesus was a white man, too." Perhaps one of those famous Nazareth blondes?

In fact, people had been depicting non-white versions of both Jesus and Santa well before Fox was beating back both the war on Christmas and the war on white Santas. The legend of the white-bearded, red-suited Santa Claus is based on a historical figure, St. Nicholas, a Greek Bishop from Myra, a city on the Mediterranean Sea now part of modern-day Turkey. As for Jesus, little is known about his actual appearance, though historians—and maybe anyone else who has spent time in the holy land—have hypothesized that he had olive skin and shorter hair.

Of course, as Christianity extended to all corners of the world, people saw Jesus as an extension of their own religious, cultural, and ethnic traditions. So he was white in most Western depictions, and less so in many others. Here are some pictures of Jesus and St. Nick that Megyn Kelly may not have seen.

Santa Claus

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Saint Nicholas from the first quarter of the 18th century; Iconostasis of Transfiguration Church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, Russia

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

St Nicholas with scenes from his life. Late 1400s or early 1500s. National Museum, Stockholm

Jesus

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

A fresco of the Madonna and Jesus in a Cathedral in Axum, Ethiopia.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Madonna in the Cathedral of The Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, Barcelona, Spain